Tag: psychology

A senior colleague told me, more than once and always kindly, that if I wanted a raise I should go get an outside offer. He was not being cynical. He was doing me a favor; passing along, unprompted, the kind of thing nobody writes down and everybody is supposed to somehow already know. It was…

There is a particular piece of mental arithmetic I have done many hundreds of times, in many seminar rooms, and I have never once done it correctly. It goes: I am lost. Nobody else has asked anything. If I ask, thirty people will notice that I am lost, and some of them will remember. The…

Somewhere in my first year of graduate school, I decided I was behind, and I decided the fix was to work until I wasn’t. I don’t remember making this decision so much as arriving at it, the way you arrive at a habit; a seminar where two sentences in a row didn’t make sense, a…

I’ve sat on grant panels where I watched two proposals land on the table back to back. One argued, with total fluency, for a result that was, if I’m honest, more hope than mathematics. The other was written by someone who understood the risks in their own approach better than anyone else in the room,…